Undertaker took the time to stand up and pick up Vincent’s portrait to place it in the armchair where he was previously sitting, before trying to grant him his rosette’s power.
The special thing about this is just that Undertaker
gave his place and power to Vincent, and is literally replaced by Vincent in the next panel
So yeah don’t mind me, I’m just here staring at this chapter’s beauty and marvelously implied hints and symbolisms that we’ll eventually learn to be true or not in about a decade from now.
It oftens shows up in a few key scenes throughout berserk and I never really thought much of it. But when you examine this more closely you find out some interesting things:
As you can probably tell, the tree is healthy state and growing (except during his birth perhaps) throughout the golden age arc:
During Lost Children Arc the tree he rested under was outright possessed. Guts himself was pretty much a Lost Child back then too:
What’s also interesting: he is literally fighting the tree in Lost
Children. During Golden age, you usually find him resting against it or
taking shelter below it. Is that a metaphor for Guts fighting
against his own nature…?
And I absolutely love how the tree is normal, but all shrivelled up and dead when Farny joins Guts and Puck (very fitting to Guts’ mental state at the time!!!).
And considering all this, this page becomes even more intriguing:
Is it just me or is the tree a metaphor for Guts’ state of mental health…?
(I’d been looking for an excuse to play with LucidChart.)
The cleverest part of this company is the continuous loop around: people attend common blood > aristocrats money > lavish music hall free food > people attend
This makes the music hall self-sustaining, and it also makes it a little clearer why Ciel’s plan to disrupt the hall worked. Drawing people away from the hall decreased the total blood output, which decreased Sirius blood available, which increased the number of corpses and decreased the amount of blood available for the aristocrats. The whole cycle breaks down at that point.
If this is an interesting format, I’ll take requests for diagramming other story arcs too. I like doing this because it forces me to highlight pieces where we don’t know how they fit in yet.
Nakamura Ryosuke shared the official illustrations he created of Eren, Mikasa, Armin, Historia, Frieda Reiss, Grisha, and Carla Yeager for the SnK Season 3 OP.
In his tweet, he writes that when he listened to the music, the theme was abot the end of one’s childhood – days that you cannot return to. Time simply goes by as you enjoy the song.
So now that we know that Undertaker really is the one who brought R!Ciel back from the dead and has confirmed his (probably unhealthy) attachment to the Phantomhives, whatever reasoning that might be, it made me think of a real-life phenomenon that I heard about a few years ago. I have to wonder if Yana is also aware of it and drawing a bit of inspiration from it.
Basically, it officially started around the 1940′s but could have been happening earlier, but some doll makers called ‘reborners’ began to cater specifically to parents who had lost children due to tragedy and still do today. They replicate newborns and infants with very carefully crafted material to make them look as life-like as possible. Some people collect them as hobbies, but some people also have them commissioned for upwards of thousands of dollars as a sort of mememto mori of their own child. These can assist with coping with death, but some people also take things a bit too far and there have been cases of parents emotionally bonding so deeply with the doll that they continue to treat it as if it were their real child. Psychologists have actually begun to study it and caution against buying a ‘reborn doll’ in certain situations. It’s a very tragic and heart-breaking phenomenon.
But it also fits as a good parallel for Undertaker, I think, who is quite literally turning his dead loved ones into ‘dolls’ because he’s unable to cope with their loss. These are just my ‘shower thoughts’ of the day.
Oh yes, I didn’t mean to say they weren’t! I know someone who’s a doll hobbyist and has a few they got second hand. But yeah, it’s also been going on for quite a while.
midnight-in-town 